Category Archives: muses

Back at the beginning of the year in 2009, I had this idea about a new Oracle for the God Apollo. The idea was spurned during university and I actually posted some of it on fpress under a different name and then forgot about posting while I finished it in my Ecco Notebook. Well last week I decided that it was high time to finish typing that story up so I did and it ended up being 9.5k and I have to say that while there is room for a sequel, I am very happy about the end product, which just goes to show that ideas never really die.

“Danae Mires go to your room!”

“I hate you!” the thirteen year old cried as she stormed up the stairs. “I hate all of you! I hate it here! I want to go home!”

Tabitha sighed as her niece’s shouting dissipated after the slamming of her bedroom door and as she slumped down on her living room couch she questioned her sister’s sanity for naming her the child’s guardian. It wasn’t the first time that the question had crossed her mind, and the forty year old was almost certain that it would be the last. But she couldn’t very well ask her sister Evangeline about her choice, because her sister—her twin sister was dead and had been for seven months.

“Oh Eva,” she murmured as she closed her eyes thinking back to her sister and wondering what she would have made of the whole situation, not to mention what sort of advice she would have given. “What am I going to do with that child of yours?”

Tabitha knew that Danae was going through a tough time. She had grown up on a Greek Island for the first twelve years of her life and now found herself as far away from the old world as she could get. Living in a sleepy Toronto suburb was such a culture shock for the young girl that Tabitha couldn’t help but feel for her niece who she had only seen a handful of times in the twelve years that she had been living overseas. Losing both her parents so suddenly in a freak storm had to be a horrible blow, after all Tabitha herself was going through the grieving process for her sister but she figured that that had to pale in comparison to losing a parent.

As it turned out there was nothing that Tabitha could do. Danae grew from an awkward pre-teen to a sullen teenager who resented everything and everyone in her life. She lashed out at her family, and got into fights at school and yet because her grades remained constant, Tabitha had no reason to complain. The same couldn’t be said for Tabitha’s eldest girl who was a year older than Danae. While Danae at seventeen was getting ready for an exchange program to Greece that the University of Toronto offered for their freshman students with astounding students with ties to the ancient land, Jane at the age of eighteen was dropping out of university pregnant by some frat boy. Jane had decided much against her mother’s wishes to keep the baby and Danae just loved how the tormentor of her troubled years was finally getting what had been coming to her.

And that’s the first couple hundred words…you can read the rest of the story here.

Thinking back to my first stories, they were shadows of things that I had read before and while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery it’s not the best way to get published. I never really finished a story until I wrote some Vampire knock-off when I was in elementary school which has since been lost.

When I finally started completing stories they all fell under the YA contemporary fantasy genre for he most part and that trend continued. Whenever I thought of writing something outside the fantasy genre my brain would seize up, but recently that all changed.

After getting on a Jane Austen kick during December 2009, a random conversation jumped into my head and I’ve been following the characters as they work through some semblance of a regency world and last week another plot in the same work un-spooled itself in my mind.

But more than that, a mainstream romantic movie-like plot worked itself out of my mind the other day at work and I’ve got to wonder whether or not my muses are progressing in a totally different direction as to what I normally write.

Five-hundred and forty-six. That’s the number of files in my unfinished ideas folder. Now to be fair some of them aren’t unfinished…there’s a lot of my first novel in there but it’s old stuff that I can’t bare to get rid of. And there’s a bunch of chapters of a finished story but because it’s one third of a whole I’ve decided that it is unfinished.

But none of that is the point. The point of this posting is the fact that I’m a writer that can start things in abundance but I have a hard time finishing them. And I don’t know why.

I mean, I feel a lot of it has to do with the fact that certain stories are meant to be written at certain times. Certainly, A ROSE FOR TIME AND SPACE is evidence of that. I started that story back in March, lost interest for a while but wrote like mad during June & finished it. Other stories I get so excited for but then lose interest a chapter or two in…thus the massive pile of unfinished works.

Sometimes, my inspiration and my muses take me by surprise. When I started scribbling down a little story about an oracle and Apollo, I figured that I’d have enough for 4k if that, but now it’s expanded to be at least 9k and who knows, it may get even longer.